Britain's Watchmaking Industry Active Again

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28542, 22 March 1958, Page 10

Britain's Watchmaking Industry Active Again

[By ERIC BRUTON, a Fellow of the British Horological Institute, and editor of the “Horological Journal,” London.]

LONDON, March 1. QN his recent 2000 mile trek across Antarctica, Sir Vivian Fuchs, leader of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, carric ’ a 50-year-old pocket watch that belonged to Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who led an expedition to the South Pole in 1910 and died, with all his companions, on the way back in March 1912. It was recovered from Captain Scott’s body eight months later by the relief expedition and until now it has been in a museum. After recent modification it performed the remarkable feat of passing the very stiff test for top class modern watches at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory and it was handed over to Sir Vivian Fuchs for his use.

Every member of the latest expedition carried a watch made in Britain by the same firm which made Captain F s historic timepiece, but these others are wrist watches of recent manufacture that may be bought by the public in jewellers’ shops. Behind that fact is the story of how a large and flourishing industry perished because it tried to stem the tide of mechanisation, and how it was reborn to become one of the most advanced in new techniques of automatic production.

Clockmaking is among the oldest mechanical arts. In England it probably began in 1368 when King Edward 111 granted safe conduct to three Dutch clockmakers from Delft, John and' William Uneman' and John Liutuyt, to visit England for a year to work. Very slowly in the following centuries’ an English school of clockmaking started to form, and it was 1631 before the English clockmakers became sufficiently powerful to obtain a charter from King Charles I authorising them to form the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers.

In the 17th century, clockmaking and watchmaking flourished in London, where such famous makers as Edward East, Thomas Tompion, Joseph John Knibb, Daniel Quare, Henry Jones, George Graham, Christopher Gould, <seph Windmills, Charles Gretton, Peter Garon, the Pinchbe.ks and Thomas Mudge had their workshops.

Not only were the clocks and watches of the 17th and 18th centuries of such fine hand craftsmanship tl manv still exist in collections all over the world, but also they incorporated new inventions that arp still the basis of good timekeeping. It can truthfully be said that every clock and watch made today has a British invention in it somewhere, regardless of where it was actually made.

Lever Escapement Invented

The balance spring was invented by Dr. Robert Hooke; the anchor escapement by William Clement; the dead beat escapement and mercury pendulum by George Graham, who also improved the cylinder escapement; the grid-iron pendulum by John Harrison, who invented the thermostat used increasingly in electrical devices; rack striking by Edward Barlow; the lever escapement—most influential invention in the history of horology—by Thomas Mudge, who thought so little of his invention at the time that he said “whoever would rob me of it does me honour.” These were only a few of the fundamental inventions of the time, and tradition of inventions still endured despite the later vicissitudes of the industry, for Edmund Beckett Dennison, later Lord Grimthorpe, invented the three-legged gravity escapement in his design for the clock at Westminster, London, which popularly ta. s its name from the bell, "Big Ben.’’ .iexander Bain, a Scot, invented the electric clock and the master and slave system. In 1922 Mr W. 11. Shortt, who is still active, invented the free pendulum clock used in the world’s observatories and which will keep time to a tenth of a second a year. Nearly three years ago, in 1955, Dr. Louis Essen built the first successful atomic clock, which will keep time to something like a second in 300 years and is used to control radio time signals from Rugby. And—perhaps most surprising of all—Mr John Harwood, still in business as a watchmaker at Harrow, Middlesex, invented and patented the automatic or self-winding watch, now being made in huge numbers in Switzerland. In the near future it will also be made in England. Production Growth In t. 18th century the horological industry in Britain was the world’s biggest, employing 70,000 craft workers out of a total population of only 10,000,000, and the English lever watch was valued in every part of the world; but by 1800 the labour force was dwindling, until in 1907 the number had fallen to 5300. One reason

was that English watchmakers refused to believe their watches could be made by machine, and continued to produce their traditional highest quality watches by hand. By the 1930’s watchmaking in Britain was all but dead, and although some clock makers survived to carry on, a number of leading firms had gone out of business. It was mainly the popularity of the new synchronous electric clock that enabled the industry to exist until the outbreak of World War 11, when the need for shell and bomb fuse mechanisms gave it fillip.

After the war it was decided that Britain must have a thriving horological industry for its pwn safety, and the progress of both clock and watchmaking in Britain since then can only be described as spectacular. From a comparative trickle in 1938, production had grown, by 1955, to: mechanical clocks, including alarms, 5,100,000; electric clocks, 624,000; watches, 3,408,000; time switches and recorders, 2,124,000. Production ir 1957, for which full figures are not yet available, follows much the same pattern. The retail value of the industry’s output for 1957 was in the neighbourhood of £25,000,000, and exports in 1955 and 1956 were around £2,000,000 at cost.